Yeah, I think the idea that the West was “tricked” is Western post hoc ergo propter hoc framing.

NJR, Current Affairs, 2020: The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

I guess the UK took my advice from last month: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_Industry_(Special_Measures)_Act_2025

ACAB includes nosy Miss Marple and imperial cop George Orwell.

The US losing control of its own soft power institutions. The Ford Foundation wants its money back.

“You’re parroting Russian propaganda talking points,” is a convenient way to dismiss inconvenient truths. If you say something that Russia also happens to say, then it must have come from Russian state disinformation, and therefore must be false, and everything you say may be ignored. If Russia says the sky is blue, then it’s anything but blue.

Back when I was going through puberty, schools still had fallout shelters, but go on.

What’s the question?

The Mongoloid brainpan is 637.4% more duplicitous than the Caucasoid brainpan though. That’s just basic race science. /s

$NGMI 🖼️ 🐵 😭 📉

I’ve got a very long, interactive graph for you. Here’s a snapshot:

World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country

Our cat is looking out the window at nature, too. He doesn’t follow the news, I don’t have the heart to break it to him.

1. Hand out tax breaks to the wealthy, creating huge budget deficits
2. Use those deficits as an excuse to slash an already fragile social safety net

The “budget deficit” is the first bluff, which virtually everyone falls for, and sets the stage for the scapegoating bluffs. hOW ARe you GOINg To PAy fOr it?

I will recycle my past answer.

Honest question from a non-communist, based on your reply here. Does one need to support Putin to be a Marxist?

In a word, no. In a few more words, support for Russia (not Putin, as historical materialists don’t subscribe to great man theory) is only a partial, temporary, tactical one, in the context of imperialist liberation. Russia is still a capitalist state, though, so it’s a two stage strategy: first liberate colonized bourgeois states from colonizer states, and second revolution within those liberated bourgeois states.

Russia is an interesting case: it has already liberated itself from the post-Soviet “shock therapy” neocolonizers. This occurred during Putin’s administration, which is why he is especially hated by the US. So now the support for Russia is in the context of keeping the colonizers from recolonizing it, and supporting Russia to the extent that it helps other states liberate themselves. But Russia isn’t trying to “liberate” Ukraine, at least not all of Ukraine. It’s trying to resolve the genocidal attacks on the people of the Donbas, and it’s trying to resolve the imperialist military expansion at its border.

• Robert Parry, 2015: The Mess that Nuland Made
• Jeffery Sachs, 2023: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

As a data point of one, I have no interest in or use for AI image generation, so this means nothing to me.

YouTube comments are so often vile that my first instinct would be to disable them altogether.

MV3 is shorter, and IMO less engaging. Hopefully the price reflects this.

I guess they’re on a train?

The problem with short URLs is that, when the site is down, as it is now, I can’t reverse engineer what the original link was.